More State of the Union Thoughts

Since President Obama's State of the Union address last week, I've been unsettled and vaguely uneasy, unable to put my finger on how he gets it wrong. I have no doubt that he gets it wrong, but exactly how?

From a comment thread at Majority Report Radio, one Kevin Baker responded to the State of the Union address. Since Kevin gets it exactly right (and expressed his desire to widely share his opinions) I am reproducing his comments below in their entirety. Thank you, Kevin--seriously--for articulating all those half-formed notions in my head in a coherent way (bolding is mine, not in original):

The real problem with Obama's speech tonight was, once again, the historical narrative that he led off with, and that he is determined to have us believe.

That is:

Once upon a time, Americans had all sorts of really good jobs because "they only had to maybe compete against their neighbor," and they could count on getting ahead if they worked hard, "and maybe even see life improve for their children."

But then "over the course of a single generation, came great technological changes." Steel mills "that had been employing thousands, now only needed hundreds of workers." Countries such as "China and India" started "making adjustments, and teaching their kids math."

Americans suddenly found themselves competing with the whole world, and that's been really tough, especially since our kids have gone from best-educated in the world to only ninth. But fear not. We "still have the best innovators in the world, the best colleges and universities. We still lead the rest of the world in patents." All it will take is a lot of education, a little social investment here and there, some strict budget-minding, and.voila! We'll beat anyone on this planet!

Nonsense.

Well-intentioned though it may be, this whole narrative makes no sense on the face of it.

So, back in the good old days, we were the best at everything, but we did well only because "we just had to compete against our neighbors"?

Say what? Which is it? Were we the best, or were we not?

China and India sure did make changes. But of course the Chinese have been "teaching math" since long before the rest of the world knew the Americas existed, and didn't India invent it? Were the changes so much better education, or the fact that the two countries emerged first from under Western thumbs, and then from suffocating systems of caste and communism over the course of the last couple generations?

And how DID we fall behind? I mean, while still having the world's best universities, best innovators, most patents, etc.?

What Obama's pseudo-history conveniently ignores is that what really changed is not Chinese students buckling down to their algebra homework, or "sweeping technological changes in the course of a generation." What changed was government policy.

American workers have ALWAYS operated in times of rapid, sweeping technological change. They've ALWAYS competed with other countries, in one way or another. And they've generally done pretty well.

The reasons they did well included the fact that for most of our history, our government protected our industries against competition from countries with desperately underpaid labor. And because the people running the industries kept inventing new stuff, and ploughing money back into their American industries, instead of shipping their plants overseas and devoting all their time and capital to figuring out new financial Ponzi schemes.

Still, though, the old America that Barack Obama refers to used to be plagued by constant, wrenching depressions. And those old industries didn't necessarily help people make a good living, or improve their children's standard of living.

Being a steelworker, or an auto line worker, doesn't INHERENTLY pay well. In fact, for many decades, such jobs didn't pay much at all.

Then the people who did them organized themselves, and forced higher wages out of owners (who didn't have the option of searching out child slaves abroad), and elected representatives who defended and extended their rights.

THAT'S the "magic formula" that American prosperity came out of. Innovation, education, inventiveness-sure. But also industrial policy, unionism, protectionism, real patriotism, and all those other things that Barack Obama and the whole, lovely class he hails from don't want to hear about because they might chip away some small portion of their staggering wealth.

But without acknowledging that narrative-without letting that narrative guide our future actions, which is the whole reason to learn history in the first place-we'll just keep butting our heads against the wall.

We can make our kids do math problems until their fingers fray and they still won't be able to compete with sweatshop dictatorships where workers make 20 cents an hour.

We can talk all we want about making social investments.and they will never be made, as long as the financial oligarchy which has severed all bonds of loyalty to this nation continues to co-opt and buy off our leaders.

But hey, in the meantime, let's find common ground: fire all the teachers!

 

Homeland Security...and Electronic Devices

Glenn Greenwald at Salon shines some light on something that most people have not heard too much about in the mainstream media.  However, since you are reading this on a blog, you obviously have at least a minimum level of comfort and experience with PCs, the Net, etc. So it seems logical that you should care about privacy, due process, reasonable suspicion, and the lack of redress.  Read on:

For those who regularly write and read about civil liberties abuses, it's sometimes easy to lose perspective of just how extreme and outrageous certain erosions are. One becomes inured to them, and even severe incursions start to seem ordinary. Such was the case, at least for me, with Homeland Security's practice of detaining American citizens upon their re-entry into the country, and as part of that detention, literally seizing their electronic products -- laptops, cellphones, Blackberries and the like -- copying and storing the data, and keeping that property for months on end, sometimes never returning it. Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime. It's completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained. There's no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing. And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse -- not even to have their property returned to them.

Go ahead and read the rest.  The creeping erosion of freedom, in little nibbles, is turning into a bigger bite.

Cats in Art: Cat Walk

My continuing Sunday series on cats in art.

Image and text credit here.  [c. mid-20th century, Max Kahn, Cat Walk, lithograph printed in color]

American sculptor and printmaker Max Kahn created this expressionistic lithograph entitled Cat Walk. In this work, the artist has created a humorous visual pun --the cat walks on a cat walk... (get it?)

I got it.

State of the Dream

This sorta goes along with my post from Wednesday:

(from Black Agenda Report, here)

Author Glen Ford, like me, also expected more, and is disenchanted with the president:

The Right’s amazing advances in recent years have been made possible by the wholesale capture by Wall Street of much of the Democratic Party, most dramatically in the person of Barack Obama, whose Black presence has neutralized African Americans as an effective political force, including most of what used to pass as the Black Left. The enemy advances without effective opposition all along the unguarded flanks and rear of progressive politics, dressed in Democratic clothing and with a brown complexion, while organizations like United for a Fair Economy instruct us to keep our eyeballs focused solely on the Republican bogeymen. It is the equivalent of wearing blinders in a battle, a guarantee of defeat.

I am exceedingly sad to conclude that the annual “State of the Dream” report, designed to arm us for struggle, is a fatally flawed weapon in the face of the Obama Phenomenon.

 

In Memoriam

We lost eighteen service members in the last two weeks.  From Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars:

The Pentagon has released the names of eighteen service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan:

US Army SGT Ethan C Hardin, 25, Fayetteville, AR
US Army PFC Ira B Laningham IV, 22, Zapata, TX
US Army PFC Robert J Near, 21, Nampa, ID
US Army SSG Omar Aceves, 30, El Paso, TX
US Army CPL Jarrid L King, 20, Erie, PA
US Army SPC Benjamin G Moore, 23, Robbinsville, NJ
US Army SGT Zainah C Creamer, 28, Texarkana, TX
US Army MAJ Evan J Mooldyk, 47, Rancho Murieta, CA
US Army PFC Zachary S Salmon, 21, Harrison, OH
US Army SPC Jose A Torre Jr, 21, Garden Grove, CA
US Army SGT Michael P Bartley, 23, Barnhill, IL
US Army SPC Martin J "Mickey" LaMar, 43, Sacramento, CA
US Marines Cpl Joseph C Whitehead, 22, Axis, AL
US Army MAJ Michael S Evarts, 41, Concord, OH
US Army SPC Joshua T Lancaster, 22, Millbrook, AL
US Marines Sgt Jason G Amores, 29, Lehigh, PA
US Navy PO Dominique Cruz, 26, Panama City, FL
US Army PFC Amy R Sinkler, 23, Chadbourn, NC

Just to pick out one person, I clicked thru to the service member from Pennsylvania, where I've lived my whole life, US Marines Sgt Jason G. Amores, 29, from Lehigh, PA.  Here's his picture:

He was married, with children aged 9 and 3.  This was his third deployment.
 
An unwinnable war with no end in sight.  I think we'll remain engaged awhile longer, simply because nobody in power wants to be the one who speaks the truth.  Namely, that this was a bad idea from the start, and that all the deaths--despite honorable and dedicated service to their country--have been in vain.
 
 
 

The Purpose of The Universe...and Ultrarunning

Ever wonder, on those long runs in the back country, about why the universe exists?  Why we exist? 

Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish pointed me to Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, at the blog Big Questions Online: 

Because whether there is a God or not, the universe per se cannot have a purpose in any anthropomorphic sense for which that term is usually employed. The universe is simply the collection of galaxies, stars, planets, comets, meteorites, and other solar system detritus, plus whatever dark matter and dark energy turn out to be. The universe is governed by laws of nature that themselves have no purpose other than what they inevitably dictate matter and energy to do. Stars, for example, convert hydrogen into helium, and they have no choice in the matter once they reach a certain size and temperature. Stars are not sitting around thinking “my purpose in life is to convert hydrogen into helium so I better get on with it.” Ditto everything else in the universe, including all living organisms, from C. elegans to H. sapiens.

Life began with the most basic purpose of all: survival and reproduction. For 3.5 billion years organisms have survived and reproduced in a lineal descent from the pre-Cambrian to us, an unbroken continuity that has endured countless terrestrial and extraterrestrial assaults and five mass extinctions (six if you count the one we may be causing). This fact alone imbues us with a sense of cosmic purpose. Add to it the innumerable evolutionary steps from bacteria to big brains, and the countless points along the journey in which our lineage could have easily been erased, and we arrive at the conclusion that we are a glorious contingency in the history of life. As Charles Darwin wrote in the penultimate paragraph of his 1859 masterpiece On the Origin of Species: “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.”

Humans have an evolved sense of purpose — a psychological desire to accomplish a goal — that developed out of behaviors that were selected for because they were good for the individual or for the group. Although cultures may differ on what behaviors are defined as purposeful, the desire to behave in purposeful ways is an evolved trait. Purpose is in our nature. With brains big enough to discover and define purpose in symbolic ways inconceivable to billions of preceding and co-existing species, humans stand apart as genuinely unique in our attention to purposeful behavior. Evolution gave us a purpose-driven life.


////SNIP////

Whether there is a God or not, all of these purposeful activities — and many more — stand as ends in themselves in the here-and-now, not as means to some other end in the hereafter. Purpose is not some prop on a momentary stage before an eternal tomorrow, where its ultimate meaning will be revealed to us. Purpose is created by us through the courage of our convictions and the honor of our actions.

There.  Think about that next time you run.  There will be a test.

   

Marriage Must Be Pretty Darn Fragile

From Shakesville, Melissa McEwan points us to the Washington Post and an article by Kerry Eleveld:

Less than a month after President Obama repealed "don't ask, don't tell," his Justice Department filed its latest brief defending the so-called Defense of Marriage Act—the law that makes gay Americans second-class citizens by outlawing federal recognition of their legal marriages.

Until gay folks have full marriage equality--and not just Civil Unions, which perpetuates the myth that there are "better" and "lesser" versions of marriage--the notion that gays are still second-class citizens remains still alive and well.

I've never quite figured out how traditional marriage is at risk because people of the same gender wish to marry.  The bride and I were talking about this recently, and her observation was that traditional marriage must be pretty darn fragile if gays marrying totally threaten the institution.

Here's how I look at it.  You gotta set these discussions in real-world, close-to-home scenarios.  Say that our daughter, whom we love with all our hearts, comes to us and says, "Mom, Dad, I'm in love and I want to marry her."

Naturally that discussion would be longer, and we'd already know pretty much what was going on, but would we say to her (again, abbreviated for brevity), "Nope, sorry, gotta withhold our blessing because it's wrong for women to marry other women."?  Or would we say, in recognition of the fact that she was born gay, "We love you unconditionally and accept you, and if marrying your partner makes you happy, we're totally on board."

Oh, and back to Melissa McEwan--if you clicked thru to see the link, you'll see that she sarcastically titled her post "I'm So Glad We Elected a Democrat, Part One Billion and Two."  She's fed up with people (e.g., President Obama) being politically expedient rather than doing what's right.  These are people's lives at stake here, it's not just some philosophical discourse.

I, too, am fed up.  Down in the comments I read this, which pretty much sums up where I'm at on all this:

I'm just *frustrated*. I was so excited to vote for Obama in my first presidential election. I defended him to all my right-wingy relatives. I bought that shiny vision for the future, and I hate, HATE those "how's that hopey-changey stuff working for you?" stickers. There was nothing wrong with the hopey-changey. Hopey-changey is EXPECTING MORE. Obama promised us MORE and then completely f***ing failed to deliver.

Umstead--9 Weeks to Go!

Teleworking from home today, so I went out early for a short run (4 miles) from the house. I was thinking about the upcoming Umstead 100 Mile Endurance Run in April, and my mind veered off into a discussion of time.

I am not running Umstead this year but am having flashbacks (positive, of course!) of my run there in 2010, basically to prove to myself that I could still run 100 miles. I was thinking, OK, it’s January, the race is still almost 3 months away, for anybody running in 2011 there’s still lots of time to complete your training.

But then I recalled that the race date was the first Saturday in April; i.e., 2011 race day is 2 April. That’s basically 2 months from now, not 3. And then I shifted times scales from months to weeks, and realized the race is only 9+ weeks out. For me, thinking in weeks always seems to bring more immediacy than thinking in months.

Perhaps this is because months--again, in my mind view—are just a bit more amorphous. Months have different durations and can start/end on any day of the week. You don’t have a structured, fixed set of weekends around which you build your long training runs. But weeks do: you go thru the 5 day workweek and then your weekend shows up, consisting of a Saturday and a Sunday, and you plan on how best to fit in the training run that you need that weekend.

In my mind, working backwards, if I were running this year, I’d be planning for 3 more long runs. These would be about 30-35 miles, three weeks apart, and ending three weeks prior to the race. Those dates work out to be 29 Jan, 18 Feb, and 11 March. As for the two weeks between the long runs--I’d be doing a 10 and a 15.

So…the entrants better be doing their last few long runs NOW. Good luck, my heart will be with you!